In
their histories, they too talk about the Prince and Glenfinnan, and
the pibroch; and in their songs about "Claverse" and "Bonny
Dundee." But though they may be Scots, they are not Walter Scotts.
But it is perhaps chiefly in the novel that you see the veritable
hog in armour; the time of the novel is of course the '15 or '45;
the hero a Jacobite, and connected with one or other of the
enterprises of those periods; and the author, to show how
unprejudiced he is, and what ORIGINAL views he takes of subjects,
must needs speak up for Popery, whenever he has occasion to mention
it; though, with all his originality, when he brings his hero and
the vagabonds with which he is concerned before a barricadoed
house, belonging to the Whigs, he can make them get into it by no
other method than that which Scott makes his rioters employ to get
into the Tolbooth, BURNING DOWN the door.
To express the more than utter foolishness of this latter Charlie
o'er the water nonsense, whether in rhyme or prose, there is but
one word, and that word a Scotch word. Scotch, the sorriest of
jargons, compared with which even Roth Welsch is dignified and
expressive, has yet one word to express what would be inexpressible
by any word or combination of words in any language, or in any
other jargon in the world; and very properly; for as the nonsense
is properly Scotch, so should the word be Scotch which expresses
it--that word is "fushionless," pronounced FOOSHIONLESS; and when
the writer has called the nonsense fooshionless--and he does call
it fooshionless--he has nothing more to say, but leaves the
nonsense to its fate.
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